The 21-st century needs a real-time reliability meter (RTRM)

In the absence of military reliability performance verification standards, the author proposes one way of implementing reliability performance accountability. The proposal consists of incorporating a real-time reliability meter (RTRM) into critical military equipment, particularly commercial off-the shelf (COTS). The methodology used in this paper results in an equation that depicts the observed failure rate as a two dimensional plane, whose values are a function of the three failure rates. The RTRM permits two types of reliability assessments: comparison of measured reliability performance to expected performance; and computation of the operating, dormant, and cyclic failure rates for a group of like equipment by capturing and storing the necessary data in the data log function.